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Samarkand Manuscript
be
venerated as a great book of wisdom. Artists were commissioned to ornament it
with pictures, to illuminate it and to make for it a casket of chased gold
encrusted with precious stones. No one had the right to copy its contents but it
was placed permanently on a low cedar table in the small inner room where the
librarian worked. There, under his suspicious surveyance some privileged
members would come to consult it.
Until then, people knew only a few of Khayyam’s quatrains, which had been
composed in his impetuous youth; now many others were learnt, quoted and
repeated – some with serious alterations. This period also saw one of the
strangest phenomena: whenever a poet composed a quatrain which might cause
trouble for him, he would attribute it to Omar; hundreds of false
rubaiyaat
came
to be intermixed with those of Khayyam, to the extent that, in the absence of the
manuscript, it was impossible to discern which were truly his.
Was it at the Redeemer’s request that the librarians of Alamut, from father to
son, took up the chronicle of the manuscript at the point where Vartan left it? In
any case, it is from this single source that we know Khayyam’s posthumous
influence on the metamorphosis the Assassins underwent. The concise yet
irreplaceable account of history was carried on in the same way for almost a
century until a new brutal interruption – the Mongol invasions.
The first wave, led by Chengiz Khan, was, beyond a shadow of doubt, the
most devastating scourge ever to cross the Orient. Important cities were razed
and their population exterminated. Such was the case with Peking, Bukhara and
Samarkand, whose inhabitants were treated like cattle with the young women
handed around the officers of the victorious horde, the artisans reduced to
slavery and the rest massacred with the sole exception of a minority who,
regrouping around the grand
qadi
of the time, very quickly proclaimed their
allegiance to Chengiz Khan.
In spite of this apocalypse, Samarkand appeared to be almost favoured, since
it would one day be reborn from its rubble to become the capital of a world-wide
empire – that of Tamerlane – in contrast to so many cities which were never to
rise again, namely the three great metropolises of Khorassan where all this
world’s intellectual activity had long been concentrated: Merv, Balkh and
Nishapur – to which list must be added Rayy, the cradle of oriental medicine
whose very name would be forgotten. The world would have to wait several
centuries in order to see the rebirth, on a neighbouring site, of the city of
Teheran.
It was the second wave of Mongol invasions which swept over Alamut. It
was a little less bloody, but more far-reaching. How can we not share the terror
of the people alive at the time, knowing that the Mongol troops were able, over a
period of a few months, to lay waste to Baghdad, Damascus, Cracow in Poland
and the Chinese province of Szechuan.
The Assassin’s fortress thus opted to surrender, the fortress which had
resisted so many invaders over a hundred and sixty-six years! Prince Hulagu,
grandson of Chengiz Khan, came in person to admire this masterpiece of
military construction; legend says that he found provisions which had been
conserved intact from the days of Hassan Sabbah.
After inspecting the place with his lieutenants, he ordered the soldiers to
destroy everything, not to leave a stone untouched, not to spare even the library.
However, before setting fire to it, he permitted a thirty-year-old historian, a
certain Juvayni, to go inside. He had been in the process of writing a
History of
the Conqueror of the World
at Hulagu’s request, which book is still today our
most valuable source on the Mongol invasions. He thus was able to go into this
mysterious place where tens of thousands of manuscripts were kept in rows,
stacked up or rolled up; outside he was awaited by a Mongol officer and a
soldier with a wheelbarrow. What the wheelbarrow could hold would be saved,
the rest was to be victim to the flames. There was no question of reading the
texts or cataloguing the titles.
A fervent Sunni, Juvayni told himself that his first task was to save the World
of God from the fire. He started to pile up as quickly as he could any copies of
the Quran, recognizable by their thick binding and stored in the same place. He
had a good score of them and made three trips to carry them out to the
wheelbarrow which was already almost full. Now, what to chose? Heading
toward one of the walls, against which the volumes seemed to be better ordered
than elsewhere, he came across innumerable works written by Hassan Sabbah
during his thirty years of voluntary reclusion. He chose to save one of them, an
autobiography of which he would quote some fragments in his own work. He
also found a chronicle of Alamut which was recent and apparently well
documented and which related in detail the history of the Redeemer. He hurried
to take it away with him, since that episode was totally unknown outside the
Ismaili community.
Did the historian know of the existence of the
Samarkand Manuscript?
It
seemed not. Would he have looked for it if he had heard it spoken of, and having
thumbed through it, would he have saved it? We do not know. What is told is
that he stopped in front of a group of works devoted to the occult science and
that he delved into them, forgetting the time. The Mongol officer who came to
remind him with a few words had his body covered with thick red-framed
armour and had as head protection a helmet which broadened out like long hair
toward the neck. He was carrying a torch in his hand and to show just how much
in a hurry he was, he placed it next to a pile of dusty scrolls. The historian gave
in and gathered into his hands and up to his armpits as many as he could grab,
and when the manuscript entitled
Eternal Secrets of Stars and Numbers
fell to
the ground, he did not bend over to pick it up again.
Thus it was that the Assassins’ library burnt for seven days and seven nights,
causing the loss of innumerable works, of which there was no copy remaining
and which are supposed to have contained the best-guarded secrets in the
universe.
For a long time it was believed that the
Samarkand Manuscript
had also been
consumed in the inferno of Alamut.
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